Category: Poetry

When you spend your childhood
learning how to play with adults
it can be quite confusing

The tears and anger flow from nowhere
and the cross-eye becomes the cross-broom
lying in the room
juxtaposed against the pink roses thriving in the sun

So later on, I mean, now
someone said I never knew what I wanted
because I was either Ali or his bee
But little did they know I was making a list

To feel as light as a cloud
To be surrounded by red geraniums
Windy cold mornings that take your breath away
Perfectly poached eggs and someone to cut the toast
Car sing-a-longs without the side-eye
Horse noses to kiss and turkeys to snuggle

Time to linger in a sanctuary
where only I have the key
endlessly blooming flowers
and friends who get me, really get me

come get me

The sirens went off, and there was silence again.

Call and response, hear the tiny wrens.

“Where have all the planes gone?” one twittered.
“I can’t get my bearings,” said the other.

Said a third:
“The hummers used to show us where to land.”

I can write the loneliest verses today.

Say, for example, “Alone is soft.”

Are we alone?

It doesn’t matter anymore, what’s below my feet.
The Scottish Play says “quiet.”

I didn’t have the heart to wake you.
It’s only a blanket.

Soft around the oils.
Breath falling.

Eyes close in blue ridges. Dreams come.
Never again. Sometimes.

Breeze through the glories
Vines like a river, like a wave
Painted gold, leaves shimmering

When my eyes told you I love you,
you tried to touch me with your tendrils.
Your dress, worn softly and falling apart,
revealed a mouse’s treasure beneath your blooms.
And purple trumpets, emerging from your shoulders,
announced the morning rain.

Some people seemed to get all sunshine, and some all shadow…”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

The cars are a river that wake with me
Silver and silent, going nowhere

The planes are up at 6 am, but their song isn’t pretty
Instead they sear the sky and hit the birds,
blood and feathers in the wings

The lights come on
but they aren’t the sun or the bright moon
They are green and harsh

Sometimes they are red
and pavlovian

She is erased, but I still watch her
The drunk, there
Looks like no other
glassy, unseeing
peering out from the pain

ethanol sits there between us
waving like the summer heat
so there’s no embrace
only breath perception

you can’t, you aren’t
I am not
I am

the tears don’t come, and I’m more sad than angry
but I don’t miss her anymore

“Ravens are the birds I’ll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.”

― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

We’re always left to ponder,
where do birds go when they die?
Do they disintegrate in the air,
or return to the ground?

I held my last bird in my hands.
Willie.
As the vet injected him, I was able to pet his head for the first time,
and last.
I told him to say hello to the other birds when he gets there,
but it’s not heaven. Heaven doesn’t exist.
Ether does.
And the souls of all the little birds surround us, in the air beyond the clouds.

We’re always left to ponder,
where do the Ravens go when they die?
Do they, as the saying goes,
become part of the dark sky?
Are they shrouded by the ebony wings of their unkindred,
and die in secret?

Pigeon, I see your feathers on the ground.
Maybe just two with no body, perfectly staged like a killer’s art.
What did you take…
or what was taken from you?

We’re always left to ponder, how does the hummingbird die?
Tiny, fragile, in the cup of a hand,
or drowning in the nectar of a foxglove?